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The evolution of the geolocation stashing game continues as technology advances. First, there was letterboxing. Created in Scotland in the 1850’s, it involved hiding a box somewhere then providing written clues on how/where to find it. It was 150 years before the next generation appeared – geocaching in 2000 – enabled by the Internet and GPS. Both of these activities involved finding a container and signing something in it. Now even that simple task has been rendered obsolete by techology.

Say “hello” to Munzee. It’s the latest entry into the geo-game realm – and it is very cool.

In letterboxing, you need a compass. In geocaching, you need a GPS device. In Munzee, you need a smart phone with the Munzee app and a QR code reader.

This is a Munzee. It’s a registered QR code on a sticker, a magnet or a tag. When you find it, you scan the code with your smart phone, digitally signing and recording the find via the Internet. How cool is that? You can make your own through the web site or you can buy them from Munzee, all ready to go. We ordered 50 stickers. It cost $17.50. No sign or guardrail is safe now.

The word Munzee comes from the German word “mûnze” (moonˊ-za) which means coin. Originally conceived using coins for game pieces, it evolved away from that but the name stuck.

Munzee has only been around since 2011. It’s the brain child of a group of hobby geeks in Dallas, TX. They originally thought of the idea in 2008 but QR technology wasn’t ready for prime time yet. Now apparently, it is.

Munzee sticker on the back of a sign.

In many respects, Munzee is like geocaching (although none of the developers had ever geocached before). It uses GPS to place and track down the munzees. The entire gaming environment is run by a central web entity – munzee (dot) com. It does, however, have its own language. Munzees aren’t hidden – they’re deployed. Munzees aren’t found – they’re captured. People who play the game are called munzers. Munzers find deployed pieces on the Munzee web site, then track them down with the Munzee app on their smart phone. The capture is done through the app, which opens the QR reader for you.

Natasha captures a munzee.

Although the parallels are obvious, so are the differences. Munzees can be hidden anywhere, including places where a geocache isn’t practical or allowed, like National Parks. That said, there are already hybrid geocaches that have a Munzee code inside it, so you can get both.

Munzee in a geocache.

The entire Munzee environment was designed with an eye towards competition and rewards. Munzers rack up points. Families, teams and corporations have had Munzee competitions. Businesses have seized on Munzees as a way to market themselves. Unlike a geocache, a Munzee can easily be put inside a business, which will bring munzers inside. Restaurants put them on menus. Boutiques put them on shelves. Some businesses offer discounts or deals for getting Munzee points at their establishment. Munzee has opened up a whole new world of possibilities previously unheard of in geo-games. Or, you can just go out and have a good time with it, which is what we do.

Consistent Internet connectivity is crucial to munzers. The game is played in real time. That’s why you won’t find any back country munzees – yet.

Coming soon to a fence post near you?

Developers are working feverishly to create an offline environment for Munzee. The results are encouraging. It is now possible to do a search for Munzees in an area, download them as GPX files and load them into a GPS device as geocaches. Then you disappear into the dead zone, locate them and capture the QR code. The find is queued up and sent when the Internet re-appears. This new capability will enable the deployment of Munzees anywhere. Here’s a link to a web-based search page that will do all that for you. It’s not yet a capability in the munzee (dot) com site. I expect that will change soon.

Also coming online are geocaching apps that will integrate munzees. CacheSense already does it. It’s the one smart phone app you can use to search for, locate and record both geocaches and munzees on the fly. Soon they’ll all be doing it or they won’t be in business anymore. Here’s a separate link to CacheSense for iPhone.

One other thing – munzee is free. You don’t pay anything for membership or the app.

So that’s Munzee in a nutshell. We just stumbled on to it five days ago. They were popping up on our CacheSense screen and we had no idea what they were. As soon as we tried it, we were hooked. It’s a natural extension of geocaching with some new twists. Now we do both. Give it a try. We think you’ll like it.

I’ve gotten some questions and feedback on how to get started in geocaching, so I’m putting together a short series of four posts to point you in the right direction. This is the first one. The second one will be on hardware. The third one will be on software. The fourth one will be on other equipment recommendations. I can always add to the series so if you’ve got questions, comments or ideas, send them along.

Geocaching originated in Beavercreek, OR and has been around since May 3, 2000. On that day, a computer engineer named Dave Ulmer hid a bucket in the woods and posted the latitude and longitude online in a GPS users’ group. He called his new activity “The Great American Stashing Hunt.” He did it to give his fellow GPS users a target to test the accuracy of their devices and had no idea what it would turn into.

A day later, fellow GPS enthusiast Mike Teague found it and posted his story on the group page. Geocaching was born, although it didn’t get called that until several weeks later.

Today there are an estimated 5 million geocachers hunting 1.8 million geocaches in every country in the world, including Afghanistan and Antarctica.

Dave Ulmer’s original stash is long gone, destroyed by a road crew. In its place, some geo-fanatics put this plaque with a geocache nearby in 2003. If you’re ever in the Beavercreek, OR area and want to stop at this holy shrine, the geocache is called “Original Stash Tribute Plaque” on geocaching dot com.

Mainstream geocaching is the province of geocaching dot com, by far the biggest and most expansive geocaching site. Starting out as a hobby site in 2000, it grew by leaps and bounds and is now run by a corporate entity called Groundspeak. If you want to geocache, this is where you start.

To access full cache details, you have to register for a membership. There are free memberships and premium (paid) memberships. They cost $30 a year per account. Here’s a link to a summary of the differences between them. You can also register at that link. If you just want to grab a few caches when you’re out doing something else or just try it out, a free membership should work just fine. If you eventually migrate into caching at different places and need to to do searches remotely or along a route, you’ll want to go with the premium. You can also mix and match. When I was geocaching with my kids, I had a premium account and they had free ones.

A geocaching membership also gives you access to waymarking dot com. This useful tool has all kinds of destinations along with geocaches and benchmarks that are nearby. It’s great for traveling and caching on the fly.

There are other sites that list geocaches, such as Navicaching, Terracaching and Opencaching. They require separate memberships but they’re free. I’m signed on to them and a couple more but they simply don’t have the extensive cache lists and features that Groundspeak does.

Now you need something to geocache with. If you have a smart phone, that may be all you need.

Geocaching technology has changed a lot in the last several years and smart phones have led the way. Gone are the days of printing out cache sheets and sticking the serial GPS device out the window to get a signal. Paperless caching is now the norm and smart phones enable geocaching on the fly, which was unheard of five years ago.

Smart phone geocaching apps can search, locate, map, list and log geocaches anywhere you have Internet connectivity. They continue to proliferate and improve but they are only as good as the phone they are installed on – and not all phones are created equal. Smart phone manufacturers have to make compromises in design, components and function to fit everything together. Sometimes, the GPS function is a low priority. The GPS chip and/or the firmware may be slow and inaccurate. It may be good on the Interstate highway but lousy on a back road. The only way to know is to try it out and/or do some research.

The best way to get some background on geocaching phones is to do a Google search on “geocaching with (your phone model).” There’s lots out there.

We’ve been through the wringer with phones. Our Blackberry Storms were excellent. Their GPS was fast and accurate. We geocached all over the country with them and used them until they literally wore out. Next we got the Samsung Galaxy. It was horrible. We took them back and got the HTC Thunderbolt, which was the state of the art phone then. It was horrible too.

That’s when I went on Google and ran down some information about phones. Motorola phones use high grade GPS chips. We traded in the HTC for the DroidX2 and have been very happy with them.

Our smart phone found the three geocaches in Luckenbach, TX but not Waylon, Willie and the boys. There’s more caches here than people – except on weekends.

I understand the i-phone is also quite good.

If you’ve got your phone, then it’s time to load a killer geocaching app. If you have a Droid, the three best apps are CacheSense, Neongeo and c:geo. The features of all three are pretty much the same – touch screens with color, searching, navigating, logging. I give the edge to Cachesense for two reasons. 1) It loads much faster than the other two 2) It has a feature that lets you create template messages for your logs. All you have to do is click on found and the templated message is called up. If you like it, send it. No more typing on a tiny keyboard. A lifetime license for CacheSense is $10.

Neongeo is very similar but without the message templates. It is Android only and costs five bucks. It’s developer is very active and responsive to the community. He turns out new features on a regular basis, often in response to geocacher input. Over the last year, Neongeo has taken the Droid geocaching world by storm. It’s an excellent app.

C:geo is also very good and has been around the longest. It was the first app to deliver live, real-time geocaching on the fly. It’s an open source app that works on Android only. Its interfaces and features aren’t quite as rich as the other two but only hard core cachers would notice the difference. The fully functional version is free. C:geo has two potential downsides. It doesn’t work on iphones and they don’t get along with Groundspeak. Rather than use Groundspeak’s programming API, they “web scrape” the data they need. Groundspeak considers them a rogue element, but that’s a developer problem and doesn’t seem to affect the end user experience. Before CacheSense and Neongeo came out, we used c:geo all the time. It was way better than Groundspeak’s own app. But there’s always the possibility that Groundspeak will run them out of town. C:geo has a cult following of sorts. The continuing conflict between the two is kind of a geocaching soap opera. Here’s a C:geo FAQ link with some good information about the whole thing.

You really can’t go wrong with any of these three. There are lots of others out there. App stores have dozens listed and I’ve tried several of them. These are the only ones I would recommend.

The iphone has its own apps and there’s quite a list. You’ll have to do some homework and testing but from a hardware standpoint, the iphone itself is a solid platform for geocaching.

My student teacher – Sgt. Blogger. Here he makes a point during a “teachable moment.” You’ll see him around the new blog “Teaching Kids Math and Other Stuff.”

Hi again,

I’ve had three real passions in my life – my family, the outdoors and teaching.

My family continues to evolve as my kids have grown up, I got re-married and now we have grandkids. You’ll see them in some of our posts and pictures.

I grew up in the Allegheny Mountains of central Pennsylvania running around with the guns and the dawgs. Then the Marine Corps gave me my outdoor fix for 20 years. Now, adventures in retirement get me outside. That’s all covered by this “Off the Beaten Path” blog.

I’ve always felt that my real calling was teaching. My mom was a teacher and I guess I inherited the gene. She always said that good teachers are born, not made. I discovered early on that I was good at it and liked it.

The Boy Scouts, martial arts and the Marine Corps gave me plenty of practice on how to teach and no shortage of subjects . When I retired from the Corps, I never really considered anything else but teaching as a second career. I taught middle school math for five years, freelanced as a Microsoft Certified Trainer for another five years then went back to a different middle school for five more years. During most of that time, I was also an adjunct instructor at a local community college teaching computers and general education subjects. In 2008, I got re-married. Pam and I both retired and became geocaching fanatics.

Teaching was the hardest I ever worked. At times it was more stressful than combat. I had a lot of success in the classroom and was nominated for the Who’s Who of American Teachers three times. Teaching is first and foremost a leadership challenge. Running a classroom is a lot like commanding a military unit. You have to lead by example, establish routines, make your standards known and enforce them firmly but fairly. When a classroom is firing on all cylinders, there’s nothing quite like it. I found it to be very rewarding and satisfying.

I always thought the biggest part of my job was to model successful and responsible adult male behavior since students see so little of it. In TV, movies, video games etc, men are routinely portrayed as losers and idiots. I was determined to change that perception. On the back of my car, I had Marine Corps and recon stickers and my NRA life member sticker. I had a dad come up to me at parent conferences one night and say “We’ve never met, but I could tell from the stickers on your car that you’re the kind of guy I want teaching my kids.” I live for high praise.

Another adoring parent. He also appears on the guest lecturer circuit.

Like most teachers, I was a pack rat and never threw anything away. In addition to this “geostuff”, which I used in the classroom a lot, I’ve got a ton of material unique to the teaching side of things. This includes years of accumulated ideas, opinions, forms, sheets, letters, exercises and evaluations. Some of it is on paper, some is on my hard drive and some is in my head. It seemed like a shame to toss it or forget about it, so I decided to give it a new lease on life and blog it.

Introducing “Teaching Kids Math and OtherStuff.” The title is self-explanatory. Most, if not all, of the content in my teaching blog will be useful to parents, coaches, youth leaders and even grandparents (whose ranks I have now entered.) If it gives one good idea or one chuckle to one person, it will have been worth it.

You’ll find some opinions and reflections on this site which you may or may not agree with. You may find my sense of humor a bit wacky but it goes with the territory I’ve been in for five decades. There are several issues in particular that I wrestled with for years without a good resolution. You’ll be seeing a series called “Classroom Capers” where I free write about anything that comes to mind. I hope you find something of interest or value somewhere on the site.

I’ll keep adding stuff until I run out, which will probably never happen. Where appropriate, I’ll cross-link things. I welcome your feedback and ideas.

Pass it on!

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About the Image

The header photo is a view of the long abandoned OTO Ranch near Gardiner, Montana, the site of our #1 favorite geocache. It was the first guest (dude) ranch in Montana. Not far from the north entrance to Yellowstone Park, it flourished in the early 1900's but folded during the Great Depression. This is back country geocaching at its best - physically challenging, spectacular scenery and lots to explore once the find is made.